What has helped your students be most successful in the classroom?
Building a safe, trustworthy, and accepting climate in the classroom sets the stage for student success. Many students have had negative learning experiences and they need to establish positive relationships to build their self-confidence and feel free to take academic risks.
What have you learned throughout your career in teaching?
Building independence is a primary goal of teaching. I need to scaffold lessons and guide them to build their independence. Along with learning content, executive functioning strategies need to be built into lessons and activities. Students often need help forming a plan and organizing their information, time, and materials.
What strategies or methods have made the biggest impacts in your classroom?
It is critical to give authentic and specific positive feedback to students. The positive feedback builds students’ self-confidence and it needs to be specific to the students’ work to best understand what they are thinking when solving a problem. I always try to determine where a student is coming from when they give me an answer so I can guide them. When using this strategy, students often feel like they aren’t making any mistakes. They feel like they are learning and building their self-confidence.
How do you encourage and motivate students who have previously been discouraged in educational settings?
Understanding the profile of each student, building upon their strengths, and using a multisensory approach helps to motivate students. Everyone learns differently. Some students are visual, auditory, physical, or contextual learners. It’s important to know the strengths of each student so I can use their strengths to improve their growth areas.
Shane Whitman
Homeroom Teacher & Instructional Coach
Shane Whitman has been a homeroom teacher and instructional coach at Chartwell since 2018. Before joining Chartwell, Shane worked at Monterey Peninsula College as a program coordinator and instructional specialist for over a decade. He oversaw the Reading Center program where he trained tutors, assessed students, and made recommendations based on their progress, using the Lindamood-Bell methodologies. Shane holds a Masters in Humanities from California State University Dominguez Hills and a Bachelors of Arts in Psychology from Humboldt State University.
